A perverse cycle defines the history of fear-based racial segregation in America. Step one in this cycle begins with the creation of inhumane and unsustainable conditions for a Black underclass by the dominant White social caste. Step two involves the natural and justified resistance to this treatment by the Black underclass. That resistance—whether it be expressed as escape from bondage, civil protest against Jim Crow, or assertion of constitutional rights in encounters with police—is then turned against the resistors. This reframing becomes step three: White social leaders mischaracterize resistance as evidence of lawless, violent, criminal behavior, using the lie to stoke racial fear and justify further oppression.

In Chapter Three, I move beyond plantation America’s shores to trace how the legal logic of chattel slavery projected out into the Atlantic Ocean. The idea that human beings could be treated as things at law was not landlocked. Rather, it was a legal concept that also infused the worldview of those who labored at sea. This becomes clear when we sift through the claims of the countless sailors, captains, and merchants who brought their disputes to colonial Vice Admiralty Courts, which governed life on British naval and merchant vessels. Litigants quibbled over many things in colonial Vice Admiralty Courts, but what united their disparate claims was an overarching assumption that people of African descent were valuable commodities. Vice Admiralty procedure helped to make this possible. Although English admiralty law had developed over centuries to allow European sailors and merchants to seize cargo and ships, Vice Admiralty litigants and judges extended the Courts’ in rem jurisdiction to include slaves found on captured vessels. This process of adaptation was silent and uncontested. Litigants, lawyers, and judges assumed arguendo that Vice Admiralty Courts could treat slaves as they would any other type of marine property. Without comment, they slotted enslaved people into ready-made forms and procedures, and brought black bodies before the Courts as objects that could be condemned, appraised, and sold.

British newcomers to South Carolina saw no irreconcilable tension between English law and the ownership of slaves, and in Chapter Five I explore how administrative law in occupied Charlestown evolved to manage an increasingly mobile slave population. Rather than reforming colonial slave law, British administrators and military officers relied heavily upon colonial precedents as they balanced their need to maintain South Carolina’s plantation economy against their desire to employ the labor of slaves in British army departments. Individual British administrators also learned to buy, sell, and argue over slaves, adopting slavery’s legal language as they sought to supplement their incomes and build wealth. As they established their own plantations and confiscated the human property of people they called rebels, they, too, treated slaves as things on a daily basis, replicating local legal practices that did not appear from their perspective to be maladaptive. Consequently, the legal administration of occupied Charles Town tended to support rather than undermine slavery as an institution, despite growing antislavery sentiment in England.

This study’s introduction presents a new way of understanding the development of slave law in plantation America. Rather than viewing slave law as an aberration or a unique colonial development, I argue that it was a natural outgrowth of an early modern English legal system that was built around procedures, forms, categories, and concepts. English men and women did not think of “law” as a creature of substance, as we do. Rather, they encountered “law” first and foremost as a set of practices and procedures. This owed much to the early development of English common law, which coalesced around a set of formal procedures and rules administered by the King’s central courts in Westminster. Among the most important of these was the writ system, which gave litigants access to remedies in the Court of Common Pleas and the Court of King’s Bench. Because the formulae of most writs had congealed by the thirteenth century, litigants could only seek relief at common law if they could fit a complaint within a preexisting writ form. The resulting reification of form had significant legal and cultural consequences. Most importantly for our purposes, it transformed procedure into a site of innovation. Although we tend to associate procedure with rigidity, early modern litigants, advocates, and judges learned to work within English law’s extant procedural parameters in order to accomplish their particular legal goals. By deploying legal fictions and expanding older categories, they found ways to make new facts fit old forms.

Chapter One emphasizes the relationship between English property law and slavery. I follow colonists as they sought to classify slaves as property, and as they deployed their knowledge of English property law on a daily basis to manage slaves. Fitting slaves into an extant legal system that bifurcated property into real estate or chattels personal was an act with long-term practical consequences. American colonists – including those beyond plantation America – understood that each particular category unlocked different ways of proceeding at law that impacted their ability to buy and sell slaves and to shield them from creditors. Building upon customary practice in the transatlantic slave trade, South Carolina colonists treated enslaved people as chattel property, at first by custom and later via statute. Whereas most plantation colonies settled upon some mixture of chattel and real property when they determined how to classify their slaves, South Carolina colonists ultimately adopted pure chattel slavery in order to facilitate commercial transactions involving enslaved people and to expand their credit with British merchants. Treating slaves as a chattel property was economically beneficial for South Carolinians, but it had far-reaching cultural implications. Through close readings of legal forms, including marriage settlements, trusts, and wills, I also watch small acts of legal transformation, moments in which colonists analogized slaves to things. In these acts of legal transmutation, South Carolina colonists compared enslaved people to livestock and other valuable moveable objects, not because they believed them to be the same as those objects, but because they believed them to be the same at law.

In Chapter Four, I watch as South Carolina colonists adapted another, much older set of legal categories and procedures, transforming their local Chancery Court into a slave court. Analyzing unstudied manuscript litigation records reveals that colonists routinely asked Chancellors to recognize property interests in people and to facilitate the transfer of familial wealth in the form of slaves. In doing so, they relied upon procedures common to English equity courts, and they invoked familiar descriptions of equity as a concept. Whereas at common law complainants were constrained by traditional forms of action, Chancery procedures gave South Carolina colonists an opportunity to claim enslaved people when evidence had been destroyed, when relatives conspired to conceal slaves, or when witnesses could not be located. Using the relative openness of Chancery bill procedure to tell their complicated stories, they asked the Court to intervene and adjudicate the space between the customary and legal. In doing so, they lay bare the dense web of arrangements and assumptions involving human property that made their plantation economy work, and the Court’s role in perpetuating those arrangements. In a place where peopled were deemed objects at law, equity – a law rooted in notions of justice and fairness – ironically opened up space for litigants to articulate claims to human beings.

Chapter Two examines the specific legal consequences of colonists’ decision to categorize slaves as chattels at law. Properly fit into an English law rubric, colonists in South Carolina and throughout plantation America transformed human beings into a dynamic form of capital that could be bought, sold, and financed with ease. As a practical matter, classifying slaves as chattel gave colonists access to a set a commercial forms and procedures that had coalesced to facilitate long-distance trading. Conditional bonds were among the most important of these, and I follow this legal form of debt as it became part of an expanding Atlantic commercial system. Originating in the Middle Ages, conditional bonds coalesced into a distinctive form that was easier to enforce in common law than other forms of debt. The enforceability of conditional bonds made them surprisingly portable as they travelled across the globe. Although this instrument had originated to suit the needs of an agrarian society, the conditional bond easily accommodated commercial ventures that assumed people could be property. The power of conditional bonds to hold debtors to account in colonial courts made them particularly useful in shoring up a trade that was built entirely upon credit. Ultimately, bonds became an unremarkable feature of commercial life in plantation societies like South Carolina and Jamaica, where creditors relied upon this much older instrument to secure a wide variety of commercial transactions.

The book concludes with a preview of slave law in the early republic. Although independence transformed English subjects into American citizens, much about slave law remained the same; English law and English legal procedure continued to be useful for citizens living in a slaveholders’ republic. Republican legal forms were not, in the end, significantly different from forms used under a monarchy, and this had far-reaching consequences. In particular, this legal continuity from the colonial period meant that the commodification of slaves not only continued, but also spread along with the expanding United States. Settlers in new plantation areas of the Deep South, who were steeped in a legal culture that valued tradition, modeled their slave laws on those of South Carolina, and therefore on the language, practices, and precedents of English chattel slavery. The plantation society that they constructed, by hewing so closely to English legal forms, perpetuated the invidious legal fiction that people were things as a working reality in the slave South.